My mother has chosen to cope with the harsh economic times by fully renovating her kitchen, and she loves nothing more than going through the checklist of all the features it will eventually boast — a high-end gas stove with stainless steel hood, ­marble-topped island, wooden cabinets and a new sink, to name a few.

“We’re also installing a garburator, which you’ll be happy to know is very green,” she said the other night while I was over for dinner. Hearing this, my brows immediately furrowed.

Although they were popular in the ’80s, I haven’t seen an in-sink food waste disposal system for years — as soon as my mother said the word “garburator,” my thoughts drifted to scary grinding noises, accidental tie-shredding and the image of Mary Tyler Moore scraping an entire plate of French toast down the drain in Ordinary People.

Either way, this contraption — known as a “kitchen pig” in Hungary and by the brand name InSinkErator throughout the U.S. (garburator is a Canadian term) — wasn’t something I’d ever considered to be eco-friendly.

After inquiring further about the logic behind this, it seems my parents’ contractor told them that their current waste disposal system — storing food scraps in a small container beneath the cutlery drawer and emptying this into the Green Bin every few days — was harbouring bacteria.

Installing a garburator would keep things more sanitary by immediately grinding stuff up in an enclosed space and flushing it down into the sewer system.

“But what about the weekly Green Bin pick-ups?” I asked, referring to Toronto’s curbside organic waste collection. “If your leftovers don’t end up in the city’s compost, where do they go?”

My mother’s response: “I’m not sure. It probably gets flushed through the pipes into the lake, where all the fishies eat it.”

Well, not exactly.

As it turns out, what actually happens is this: The pulverized organic waste from the garburator gets mixed with whatever else gets flushed down residents’ drains — whether it arrives via sink, toilet or shower — and ends up at a sewage and wastewater treatment plant. Here, all the solid matter is separated and either turned into fertilizer or simply shipped to a landfill.

According to Pablo Päster, a manager at Ottawa-based greenhouse-gas management firm ClimateCHECK and regular columnist for Treehugger.com, garburators do have some environmental benefit but are nowhere near as effective as composting. They may be a good alternative to throwing food directly into the garbage, but that’s where the green benefits end.

One of the common problems with in-sink disposal units, says Päster, is the increased likelihood of clogs, especially if the food waste contains saturated fats, which solidify at room temperature and can build up inside pipes. Although these tend to occur more often in high-traffic restaurants or commercial buildings, blockages are nonetheless responsible for about 75% of all untreated sewer overflows.

That said, it’s worth noting that garburator technology has improved over the years.

“The newer versions of units like the InSinkErator can chop up avocado pits and pork-rib bones to the point where they can pass through an extremely fine sieve,” Päster says.

Still, conveying food waste through a pipe — no matter how finely ground — requires extra amounts of water and energy, and depending on where the sewage empties out, increased nutrient loads from the food can negatively impact surrounding aquatic life by lowering oxygen levels in lakes and streams.

Furthermore, as urban composting options now range from curbside pick-up programs to indoor vermiculture techniques and products such as the NatureMill — an under-the-counter composter made from recycled materials, which comes with a small heater and mixer — the number of people disposing of food waste in the regular garbage is rapidly dwindling, even in apartments and colder climates.

Meanwhile, cities like Ottawa and Guelph, Ont., have chosen to ban garburators outright (in Toronto, the policy is somewhat murky — it depends on whether a home’s waste flushes into a single pipe or two separate pipes) and the Niagara region simply discourages installing them.

Ultimately, my mother’s contractor was right in that garburators have their advantages, but it has more to do with germs and aesthetics than the environment. They are unnecessary in most modern living spaces and practical only for catching food scraps that don’t make it to the compost bin.

“I bought a house six months ago and it came with an InSinkErator,” says Päster, “but we already compost all of our food waste, so it just gets used when we’re rinsing dishes and a few zucchini peels are going down the drain anyway.”